Kitchenette Unbuilding: Two Black women writers on ‘the heart of the home’

 

By the middle of the twentieth century, the gains in public respect and civil rights that many Black citizens of the United States expected from their military service during the first World War had failed to materialize.  The recurrent irony, of another World War, when African Americans were again asked to fight to preserve democracy abroad and extirpate genocide-minded bigots, was not lost on black civilians and military personnel; nevertheless, African Americans responded to the call to service.  Yet when set next to the all too brief efflorescence of African American arts and letters in the period between the world wars, the continued underemployment of African Americans, educated or not, and the unceasing de facto and de jure segregation of society, the cynicism of black authors at mid-century should not surprise anyone.  In very different ways, two novels appearing within a decade of the Second World War’s end engage with America’s abrogated promises.  Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953) each offer narratives about the ability of African American women to attain positive personal and social goals.  Each author limns the life of a young married black woman as she attempts to deploy her literacy, native abilities, and domestic economy into a safe world for herself and her growing family.  Unsurprisingly, the kitchen—long seen as contributing to the Black woman’s disempowerment—figures significantly in these fictions.

 

This event was part of a two part workshop with Prof. Zafar on March 14th, 2023 titled "Kitchen Improvisations: 19th Century Cookbooks, Grandmother’s Harlem Kitchen, and the Legacy of Verta Mae Smart Grosvenor’"at the Science Wing 313, 1265 Military Trail—University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus.

 

 

Rafia Zafar is Professor of English and African & African American Studies and the Program in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.  She holds degrees from the City College of New York (BA, English), Columbia University (MA, English & Comparative Literature) and Harvard University (PhD, History of American Civilization).  In April 2024 she will return to the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy, where she will lecture in its master’s program in Gastronomy: World Food Cultures and Mobility.  At her home institution she teaches popular courses on Food & Literature and Black Foodways.

 

Zafar’s major publications include Recipes for Respect:  African American Meals and Meaning; the two-volume Harlem Renaissance Novels: The Library of America Collection (editor); We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870; Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl  (co-editor); and God Made Man, Man Made the Slave (co-editor).  In addition to her book publications, she co-edited a special issue of African American Review on the bibliophile and historian Arturo Schomburg.  Her awards and fellowships include the Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair at Utrecht University, a Ford Foundation Post-doctoral fellowship, election to the American Antiquarian Society and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library).  She began her career in foodways during university, slinging cheese at a little gourmet store in New York City that morphed into Dean & DeLuca, now gone, but at its height a veritable temple for professional chefs, gourmets, and food tourists alike.  

 

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Munk School of Global Affairs and Pubic Policy and the Culinaria Research Centre, University of Toronto Scarborough.